Back in January, we speculated about a funding round for Ripple Labs. Today, the organization behind the Ripple Protocol officially announced it closed the venture round, which totals $28 million. Added to the three rounds the company received in 2013, the San Francisco-based company’s total funding stands at $37 million.
Major investors in the new round include:
- IDG Capital Partners
- Venture arm of CME Group
- Seagate Technology
- AME Cloud Ventures
- ChinaRock Capital Management
- China Growth Capital
- Wicklow Capital
This global mix of venture capital and strategic investors aligns with Ripple’s focus on banking in tandem with worldwide corporate treasury use-cases. Dave Morton, senior VP, finance and treasury at Seagate Technology says, “With its real-time settlement capabilities, we recognize the opportunity for Ripple to reduce money-transfer costs, create transparency, and increase working capital in corporate treasury use-cases.”
Larsen plans to use the funds to expand into Asia and facilitate customer onboarding by supporting more access to liquidity in the Ripple system. Also supporting the Asia expansion effort, IDG Capital partner’s Li Feng will join Ripple Labs’ board of directors. Feng was an early investor in Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi and CreditEase.
According to Chris Larsen, CEO and co-founder of Ripple:
Our mission is to modernize decades-old payments infrastructure with IP-based technology so value moves around the world as freely, easily, securely and transparently as information on the web today. Financial institutions, market makers and corporations are laying the foundation for this internet of value, contributing and providing liquidity for global payments. With investors like CME Group and Seagate joining the fold, we’re well positioned to accelerate adoption amongst these key customers.
Ripple seeks to create another set of rails for international money-transfer by functioning as a distributed-payments technology that connects the world’s disparate financial networks to securely transfer funds in any currency in real time.
Ripple Labs debuted as OpenCoin at FinovateSpring 2013.